I got a little busy with out activities and didn’t get things posted like I had planned to, so here is the ending of our circus week.

On Day 4, we were back to work and so had to do some quieter activities. I noticed that in Larger Blonde’s classroom his teacher had a big stack of red solo cups and the kids always ran to play with them. They built with them…all kinds of things. So, I thought it wold be fun to do at home and picked up some smaller cups and colored craft sticks to see what they could to with those.

They had some fun building, although the Small Blonde had more fun knocking things over. We got our workbook pages done and did some coloring and then it was time to head home. Once nap time was over, we finally had a chance to play a game that I had planned for earlier in the week. We built catapults out of craft sticks and used paper plates as targets. Our missiles were pompoms.

(please excuse the paper shreds on the floor…they were so excited to play I couldn’t get the vacuum out first so I had to wait until they were done). I would have to say that this was the most fun activity we did this week. At least in their eyes. They could compete with each other and had an equal chance on who would score the most points. Of course there were prizes.

On Day 5 we had more games to play. Two of them did not work out so well. The first one was the ring toss. I had them color the rings on paper plates so that we knew whose rings belonged to who. However, because the paper plates are thin, they did not sail like a frisbee. I probably could go back and staple a couple of layers together and it might work better….we might have to try that another time.

The Small Blonde had quite a bit of trouble with this game even without the plates sailing. The next game we did, I didn’t even take pictures of. We tried to do a squirt gun race. We went outside for this one. I took two plastic cups and put holes in the bottom by the edge so yarn could run from the mouth of the cup through the hole at the bottom. Then with each cup being on a different piece of yarn, I tied them to some things in the yard so they were about chest high to Larger Blonde. You are supposed to squirt the water into the cup, hitting the bottom of the cup and causing it to travel down the length of the yarn. First one to the finish wins.

I’m not sure if I needed bigger cups, or if the yarn caused the hang up, or if the hold really needed to be in the corner of the bottom of the cup. Either way, the boys couldn’t make them go. I still think this has potential to be a fun game, but to modify things we are going to run nylon cord through a straw and tape the cup to the straw. I’m hoping that will work out better. I think we can try this again during space week and we can dress our cups like rocket ships. Either way, it didn’t go well and we headed back inside to do something else.

I may have mentioned that our local library has cake pans available for check out. If not, they do. We checked out a clown face and we baked a cake.

We took turns stirring and getting it ready for the oven. While we waited for it to bake and then cool, we tried another game.

You may know this as the fishbowl game. You take wide mouth cups and put water in them and then toss ping-pong balls into the cups. Since it was supposed to get super hot outside, this needed to be modified for an indoor game. So, we simply took out the water. We had smooth ping pong balls and golf ball type ping pong balls. Each boy got one type and tried to toss theirs into the cups.

The Small Blonde ended up being pretty good at it much to the chagrin of his older brother. That being said, Older Blonde did not do a very good job of losing to his brother. So, we had more talk about self-control and not letting our Hulks out. In fact, this was a pretty bad week for not keeping our inner Hulk under control and so neither one earned their Self-Control Badge. We are going to try again this week and see if we can’t tame that inner Hulk a little bit.

Once nap time was over, it was time to decorate our clown. They had fun decorating, but I think they enjoyed eating it more.

I know it may not look all that tasty, but they each had a hand in mixing, backing, and decorating it. We read a recipe and followed directions and planned out some colors. Now it is time to return the pan to the library.

What do we have planned for this week? Well, I got a little behind in my planning as we had some company this weekend so we are going with Pokemon Week!